Stroke clinical trials at University of California Health

The purpose of this study is to find out what are the best settings for applying electrical nerve stimulation over the skin for the short-term improvement of hand dysfunction after a stroke. The ultimate goal is to some day design an effective long-term training program to help someone recovery their ability to use their hands and function independently at home and in society. In order to know how to apply electrical nerve stimulation to produce a good long-term effect on hand dysfunction, we first need to know how to make it work best in the short-term, and improve our understanding of for whom it works and how it works.We will use a commercially available transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) unit to gently apply electrical nerve stimulation over the skin of the affected arm. This is a portable, safe and easy to use device designed for patients to operate in their homes.

Patients harboring dolichoectactic vertebrobasilar (DVB) aneurysms are at risk of suffering SAH, ischemic stroke, and/or brainstem compression and many patients are not offered invasive treatment due to the futility of existing surgical methods. Consequently, there is demand for development of medical therapy for DVB aneurysms

Durable left ventricular assist devices (dLVAD) have been increasingly utilized since the mid to late 1990s, with an uptick of utility starting in 2010 following expanded indications for therapy to not only include a bridge to transplantation strategy, but also for those individuals who suffer from advanced heart failure (HF) and do not qualify for cardiac transplantation. Despite the decreasing size of the newest generation devices leading to a lessened occurrence of adverse events, bleeding and infection still remain a concern for clinicians, as well as a general lack of predictability towards adverse events in individuals with a dLVAD in place. There is a lack of description in the literature currently, regarding the interface between what the pump data provides and what is seen in clinical practice. There also is little known about the effects of what is provided in the pump data, in correlation to quality-of-life following dLVAD implantation. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to prospectively analyze normal and abnormal pump data through pump operations such as suction events, low flow alarms as well as other adventitious alarms, PI events and power cable disconnects greater than 20 seconds, from the HeartMate 3 ® dLVAD in order to clinically correlate this data to quality of life, frailty and other various medical conditions and adverse events as defined by the Interagency Registry for Mechanically Assisted Circulatory Support (Intermacs). This will be achieved through two aims: 1) Evaluate the effectiveness of dLVAD pump operations data on clinical practice application (quality of life, frailty and various medical conditions, and adverse events such as GIB, RHF, infection, hypertension, arrhythmias and stroke); and 2) Evaluate correlations and relationships of longitudinal normal and abnormal dLVAD pump operations data, to demographic and clinical variables. This study is the first study to evaluate HeartMate 3 ® dLVAD pump operations data over time for effectiveness in the clinical practice.